I have thought long and hard about the topic that I plan to write on today, Privacy. I taped my laptop’s webcam about 2 weeks ago, it afforded a renewed notion of security, for the past 2 years, I have had it obscured because the lid of my laptop is mostly closed. But now, I am all in. When I think about the doors that I have left open for attackers, I want to be sure that there’s nothing obviously wrong that I am doing. Before my recent Ubuntu re-install, I had the package openssh-server installed on my primary computer! YEAH. Port 22 was open, it was behind a router and I used it to connect to...
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Ah, finally, I made some real progress with Emma (Austen). The characters are realy panning out, this book is far easier to read than I would have thought of, she writes in a simple style, and there are a few complex sentences here and there, but most of them are conversational and easy to understand!
I learnt some archaic spellings that I believed were typos, hilariously. choose was spelled chuse and show was spelled shew. Very very surprising!
I am almost immediately reminded of this movie:
A 2010 Hindi movie with Sonam Kapoor as Aisha and Abhay Deol and some other good actors. Aisha is definitely inspired from Emma, she’s rich, good looking, doesn’t want...
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I started reading Emma (Austen) today! The comforts of a story being linearly narrated are manifold, I missed that! (Both my previous books were confused narrations which switched here and there and totally left me in reading-epilepsy, I liked that too, it’s good to be back nonetheless) This story is also written in late-18th century English with the whole flourish and the Keira Knightley and Rosamund Pike-esque characters. Emma Woodhouse’ introduction was solid, Mr. Knightley just entered the scene!
(That applies to Tuesdays this semester)
Meanwhile, fun fact, most of my previous posts have been really late, about 30 minutes before midnight or hours after midnight. I love Git for this extent of statistics...
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Okay, I can feel this being a short post. It’s just that I am in the phase between two books where I haven’t committed to anything just yet. Emma (Austen) is waiting to be picked up. That book is in the public domain, and the people at Amazon are really nice to put it up on the Kindle store and save everyone the trouble of having to download it and copy it over to the Kindle!
An interesting thing that I discovered today was the total number of passengers that use the Indian Railway system each year. The number is HUGE. It’s HUGE, it’s like nothing I would have imagined. Before seeing the figures, I made a rough estimate of...
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Finally, I got the 1 hour I needed to finish Handmaid’s Tale. A detailed review is up on Goodreads: here.
After finishing this, I got to thinking about whether I should compare this with the other dystopias that I have read. The most influential of these was 1984 (Orwell). A surveillance state with some horrible restrictions on everything and horrible food for everyone who was not a proper Inner Government official. Gilead is a different world, of course. There are stricter observations, but almost no surveillance. Instead this is replaced by a complex heirarchial system among women that ends up in all of them keeping a wary eye on each other for possible signs of betrayal, laziness, non-adherance to...
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There were some serious production issues in the past couple of posts. The images were not properly downloaded (I downloaded them using wget and that didn’t work out), titles were not right, categories weren’t added. I have fixed all of that now, there was even a spelling mistake, a hilarious one too. I had mis-spelled synced as sinked, I didn’t even notice it when I was typing!
Anyway, the quality of everything should improve from here on out, I am going to visit the post and skim it right after posting. I think I should talk about why I am using Jekyll for this whole series and also as my primary blog when there...
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I am reading Force and Opinion, an essay that was posted on Metakgp Slack, when I posted my surprise at having found the Internet Shutdowns in India. I am still reading it, but it sounds like a solid thing to talk about in another post. I should maintain a TODO list of topics that I want to talk about. (I am now switching to Trello to create that list)
The mouse thing happened again. This Ubuntu was started only about 3 hours ago. This is extremely frustrating, I don’t want to go through the pain of re-installing Ubuntu all over again with the right configuration and I don’t want to have to keep restarting the PC. That would...
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Yeah, I missed it. But this is fine, I don’t blame anyone for this. I slept and woke up knowing exactly what I had done. I think the repenting part is more important than just missing it. (It also means I can sit down for 1 hour and write continuously about something that I haven’t decided yet!)
Today was the Eastern Groups performance for the Social-Cultural General Championship in IIT Kharagpur. These are inter-hostel competitions which are elaborately arranged, practiced for and performed. It’s kind of a big deal for everyone involved. I have done it since my second year. (Our hostel’s performance was around 2330-2355 last night. I now know that we won the Gold medal for our performance!)
That excerpt is from On Air with AIB, the first off script segment in season 2. It’s completely true!
On the happy side, I am 78% through with Handmaid’s Tale! The story has spiraled completely off the charts. The backstory is finally pieced together now, and the present has taken center stage with some INCREDIBLE stuff happening. The commander’s character had a surprising amount of depth, and when they finally revealed (was it obvious?) that he was in one of the top positions because of which all these privileges were accorded to him, I was rather surprised that he was so different about something that he...
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YES! I think that everyone reading this is going to think 1 of 2 things:
(a) A fourth year engineering student is getting so excited about getting an LED to blink on an Arduino? Are you kidding me? AMATEUR!
(b) What is the big deal?
Well, a back story is in order. I have been a part of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle since February 2014. That was the second semester of my first year, since then I have seen people around me in the Embedded and Electronics teams of this research group do stuff with Arduino, other micro controllers, small computers like Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black or Intel Galileo. I never really meddled...
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